I’ve been reading Alan Dugan lately, one poem at a time. The morning is best for me, before the newspapers, even before the caffeined tea. Others prefer the evening, just before bed, or while lying in it. A small husk of silence is the requisite thing, surrounding the seed of the reading.

Here’s an early Dugan poem, 1961.

On An East Wind from the Wars

The wind came if for several thousand miles all night
and changed the close lie of your hair this morning. It
has brought well-travelled sea-birds who forget
their passage, singing. Old songs from the old
battle-and-burial grounds seem new in new lands.
They have to do with spring as new in seeming as
the old air idling in your hair in fact. So new,
so ignorant of any weather not your own,
you like it, breathing in a wind that swept
the battlefields of their worst smells, and took the dead
unburied to the potter’s field of air. For miles
they sweetened on the sea-spray, the foul washed off,
and what is left is spring to you, love, sweet,
the salt blown past your shoulder luckily. No
wonder your laugh rings like a chisel as it cuts
your children’s new names in the tombstone of thin air.